In a typical cellular wireless communication system, an area is divided geographically into a number of cell sites, each defined by a radio frequency (RF) radiation pattern from a respective base station. The base stations of the cells are then coupled to a switch or gateway (which collectively may be referred to as a “switching system”) that provides connectivity with a transport network and/or to a signaling network. When a mobile station (i.e., wireless communication device), such as a cellular telephone, personal digital assistant, pager, or appropriately equipped portable computer, for instance, is positioned in a cell, the mobile station may then communicate via an RF air interface with the base station of the cell. Consequently, a communication path can be established between the mobile station and the network, via the air interface, the base station and the switch. In this way, the base station(s) and switches work in combination to function as a radio access network (RAN), providing mobile stations with RF access to engage in wireless communications, such as telephone calls or Internet communications.
In general, the air interface used for communications from a base station to mobile stations (i.e., the forward link) may be divided into a number of channels, including traffic channels used to carry bearer traffic (e.g., voice or other user data) and control channels used to carry overhead messages. Depending on the wireless technology used, the air interface can be divided into these channels through code division multiplexing (with each channel defined by modulation with a specific code), time division multiplexing (with each channel defined as a segment of time), frequency division multiplexing (with each channel defined by modulation with a specific frequency), and/or some other mechanism.
When a RAN receives a request to connect a call to a mobile station (which may be for various different types of communications, such as voice communications or data communications), the RAN will typically page the mobile station in an effort to determine whether the mobile station is available to receive the call. In practice, for instance, the switching system may direct a base station to broadcast a page to the mobile station over an air-interface paging channel. If the mobile station receives the page, the mobile station typically responds with an acknowledgment message back to the RAN, which would cause the switching system to continue setup of the call to the mobile station.
If a base station has numerous pages to send, then the paging channel can become congested, which may delay call setup or even result in a page not reaching the intended mobile station. As such, base stations commonly group a certain number of pages (that are typically intended for different mobile stations) into a general page message (GPM) for transmission via the paging channel. In this arrangement, each page included in the GPM may take the form of a page record, which is generated by the base station upon receipt of an indication from a switch that an incoming communication has been received for a mobile station. Furthermore, to conserve bandwidth, and so that more pages can be transmitted in a GPM of the same size, each page record in a page message may be concatenated.